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Paul Robeson Sings

“Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans”, quoth John Lennon. Summer is life, a high note singing on a breeze: the Longest Day happens quickly.

This year, we marked this midsummer moment with a Permaculture Introduction course and gathering at Dial House, an autonomous space that reappears on numerous branches of OrganicLea’s extended family tree; and the traditional solstice celebration and horticultural games. In the latter, the Fruit Team’s triumph was long-awaited and fitting, for nothing says summer like ripe soft fruits.

Queen Crimson of the fruits is the strawberry, the picking of which has been as frenzied as ever over the midsummer weeks. This year the run-in to Wimbledon has met a sweet volley of warmth, meaning more time spent plucking into punnets, rather than chucking off the rotted and the slugged, an altogether better pursuit. Still, these days the strawberry harvest seems far from a fleeting glory, almost never ending, leading me to ask whether it’s sensible to cultivate eight beds of berries: the final answer seems to be yes. People love them, they always go.

Equally loved, picked less frenziedly through a longer, glasshouse, window, are the fruits of Lycopersicon esculentum, the tomato. For the first time, we have these ripe by the solstice. Just a few, and just one cultivar – “Darby Striped Yellow/ Green” – but that’s enough to set the rest of them off, like a pack of howling wolves. This year the howls I’m most looking forward to hearing from are our new varieties, and one in particular, the black tomato “Paul Robeson”.

As a human, Paul Robeson, born in 1898, achieved international renown as a singer and actor. His outspoken support for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, against racism at home in the States, and his interest in the Soviet Union, led to his blacklisting during the McCarthy era, the revoking of his passport and continued harassment by the FBI. Such persecution by the authorities contributed to the demise of his career and health. He died in Philadelphia in 1976.

Gone but not forgotten. By their fruits shall ye know them. Like so many black tomatoes, “Paul Robeson” hails from the east, bred by Soviet horticulturalists and named in his honour, a tribute to his anti-imperialist stance and his full-bodied baritone. We eat these always in remembrance. His unique relationship with Welsh coal miners, who he sang, worked and marched alongside in the 1920s, resurfaced this century in the Manic Street Preachers track “Let Paul Robeson Sing”. His signature tune “Ol’ Man River” is still known and sung across the world: “He don’ plant tater/ He don’ plant cotton/ An‘ dem dat plants ‘em/ Is soon forgotten/But Ol’ Man River/ He jes’ keeps rollin’ along”.

Most importantly, his unfashionable challenging of his home country’s apartheid sowed some of the seeds of the civil rights movement, and the rest is history: full political rights, and a level of racial equality and dignity that could only have been dreamt of in Robeson’s time.

Some of the seeds sown are producing ripe fruits, but there is still a long way to go.